Divine Fate / Ishu Patel

Divine Fate is 1993 animated short film by Ishu Patel, an animation film director/producer and educator from India, produced by National Film Board of Canada.

This colorful short animation tells the tale of a mythical universe whose existence is threatened by the arrival of unthinking and uncaring visitors. A cautionary tale with a pro-environmental theme, it is a metaphor for our times.

Ishu Patel is an animation film director/producer and educator from India.

Born in Gujarat, India in 1942, Ishu Patel graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda, completed his graduate studies in Visual Communication at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, and advanced Graphic Design at Basel School of Design, Switzerland.

A Rockefeller Foundation Scholarship brought Ishu Patel to the National Film Board of Canadato study animation filmmaking for a year, and in 1972 he joined the NFB. For twenty-five years under the NFB mandate Ishu Patel produced and directed personal animated films and mentored young filmmakers. There he adapted and developed several notable techniques: the Norman McLaren technique of multiple passes and variable exposures he employed for the abstract film Perspectrum; the under-lit plasticene technique he discovered and developed for Afterlife and Top Priority; under-lit pin holes with multiple passes he developed for the film Paradise; and the procedures for moving thousands of tiny beads under an ever zooming camera he developed in The Bead Game.

Through the National Film Board of Canada’s Outreach Program Ishu Patel conducted animation workshops with the Inuit artists of Cape Dorset, Nunavut, with healthcare fieldworkers in Ghana, and with students in the former Yugoslavia, in Korea, Japan and the USA. During those years he returned regularly to Ahmedabad, India where he often taught his approaches and techniques to the animation students at his alma mater, the National Institute of Design, and contributed assistance in formulating the animation program.

After leaving the NFBC in 1998 he conducted student workshops at the Kaywon School of Art and Design, and the Animation Academy of South Korea, in Seoul. In 2000 he joined the University of Southern California, School of Cinema and Television, Department of Animation and Digital Arts, in Los Angeles, where he was granted tenure.

Upon returning to his studio in Canada he continued mentoring young faculty and developing curricula. He undertook an analysis of the Zee Institute of Creative Art Animation Program and Curriculum, in Mumbai, India, while conducting a two month series of Master Classes at the ZICA Schools in Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Kolkatta.

In 2006 Ishu Patel conducted a series of lectures and seminars geared for the Indian animation industry of India, in Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai, sponsored by the National Institute of Design.

He has conducted Master Classes at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, the University of Buffalo Media Arts Program and the Animation Image Society of Toronto. He has given week-long Master Classes at the School of Animation, Communication University of China, Beijing, and at the School of Animation, Southwest University of Nationalities, Chengdu, China. Ishu Patel was Special Guest and conducted screenings and a Master Class at the 7th. Big Cartoon Festival in Moscow, Russia, November 2014.